Speaking with Confidence

Lesson 1: Your voice in everything you do

Goal: see where you already speak each week, and pick the situations that matter most to you.

Speaking is not just public speaking

When people say “I’m not a good speaker”, they usually picture a stage, a microphone and a crowd. That’s a small part of speaking. A typical working week is full of it:

Giving an update in a team meeting
Asking a question, or disagreeing, in front of senior people
Running a small meeting, a committee or a project catch-up
Phone and video calls with clients, suppliers or a doctor
Explaining something to a new colleague
A job interview, a performance conversation, a negotiation
A short speech at a birthday, a farewell or a funeral

The same few skills carry across all of them: staying steady when you’re nervous, sounding clear, getting to the point, and listening. Get better at one setting and the others improve too.

People judge thinking by voice

How you sound changes what people think of your ideas, not just of you.

In a set of experiments, recruiters and other evaluators judged job candidates’ pitches either by reading them, or by listening to or watching the same words spoken. When they heard the pitch, they rated the candidate as more intelligent, thoughtful and competent, and were more likely to want to hire them. The voice carried cues of thinking (variation in pitch, pace and pauses) that text alone lost (Schroeder and Epley, 2015). Some evidence.

Two things follow. Speaking is often a better way to make your case than email: if it matters, say it. And the way you speak is worth working on, because listeners use it to judge the substance.

The 7-38-55 myth

You may have heard that only 7% of a message is in the words, 38% in the tone of voice and 55% in body language. That figure comes from two small 1960s studies where people heard single words (like “dear” or “terrible”) said in different tones, and judged how much the speaker liked them (Mehrabian and Ferris, 1967). It was about feelings and attitudes when words and tone disagree, not about communication in general. Mehrabian himself has said it doesn’t apply to ordinary speech.

Your words matter a great deal. What is true is that when your words and your tone clash (“I’m fine,” said flatly), people believe the tone.

Confidence is built, not born

You don’t need to become a different person. Confident speakers mostly:

Speak often, in small low-stakes doses
Prepare the opening and the point, not every word
Notice nerves and carry on anyway
Ask for, and use, specific feedback

That’s what this course practises. Lesson 2 deals with nerves; the rest is skills you can learn.

Voice and leadership

Leadership and voice go together. Whether or not you have a title, leading mostly means talking: saying where things are heading, running the meeting, giving feedback, staying calm when something goes wrong, and making room for other people to speak up. As you get better at speaking, you’ll find people start looking to you to lead, and as you lead more, you’ll need your voice more. Lesson 10 covers this directly.

Exercise 1

Make a quick list of every time you spoke to more than one person, or on a call, in the last week. For each one, give yourself a score from 1 (I avoided it or it went badly) to 5 (I said what I meant, clearly). Circle the two situations you most want to improve. Keep this list: it’s your speaking log.

Sources

Schroeder and Epley (2015), The sound of intellect: speech reveals a thoughtful mind, increasing a job candidate’s appeal, Psychological Science
Mehrabian and Ferris (1967), Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels, Journal of Consulting Psychology